World's Most Evil Killers - Season 1, Episode 9 - Stuart Hazel - Full Episode | Forensic Files

♪♪ -The whole community are in shock over this. -I want Tia found. -The last time I see her was Friday.
-We just hope that we find her. -I'll miss her forever. -On August the 9th, 2012,
a man desperate to find his partner's granddaughter sat down for a televised interview
in the hope that she would still be found alive. -I know deep down in my heart that Tia walked out of my house.
What happened after that is I don't know. -By the Thursday morning after the phone call
that I'd had saying Stuart would give an interview, I knew this was an interview with the killer,
no doubt about it at all. -Stuart Hazell had murdered 12-year-old Tia Sharp and hidden her body
in the loft of her grandmother's home. He was hiding in plain sight. -He knows exactly what happened.
He's the only one who knew what happened in this situation, and I think the fact that he has all this knowledge
and these other people don't, he's really getting off on that. -Stuart Hazell had lied to the country
and become one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ It was a crime that horrified the nation.
In the summer of 2012, 12-year-old schoolgirl Tia Sharp disappeared from her grandmother's house
in South London, prompting one of the most publicized search campaigns in British history, but on the 10th of August,
it came to an abrupt end with a twist so horrific, it seemed impossible to comprehend.
Tia's body and her killer had been right in front of the cameras the entire time.
-The sense of loss here is mixed with all sorts of emotions. People feel cheated.
Their week-long campaign was a desperate mission to find Tia Sharp. It ended with the 12-year-old found dead
in her own grandmother's home. -The killer was 37-year-old Stuart Hazell, a man that Tia looked up to
and affectionately called Granddad. Detective Nick Scola remembers encountering him
during the search for Tia. -Throughout all of my meetings with him, his demeanor never really changed.
He was always a very quiet person. He didn't come across as being particularly intelligent
or articulate, and he answered questions very simply. -But behind Hazell's quiet nature
was a ruthless, callous killer. -Stuart Hazell committed the most horrible of murders,
yet was able to lie to his family, lie to his friends. To do that, he must have been
a particularly calculating and vile man. -His story begins over 40 years ago. Born on the 26th of May, 1975, in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey,
Stuart Hazell was introduced to a life of dysfunction from an early age. -His father was in and out of prison,
so there wasn't a lot of stability. It was quite disorganized. It was quite chaotic.
He spent quite a lot of time in the residential-care system. He was moved around quite a lot, and I think that did have
quite a significant impact on his personality because he didn't really form attachments with other people.
So that kind of absence of warmth, that absence of closeness in those early years
is something that really did shape him. -By the time Hazell reached his teens, he'd already begun a life of petty crime.
-Stuart Hazell started drinking when he was about 13, and that got him into quite a lot of trouble.
So he ended up with his first conviction when he was 14 years old. -It was a pattern that continued into adulthood.
Between 2001 and 2010, Hazell was in and out of prison for offenses ranging from racially aggravated behavior to drug dealing.
In 2003, 28-year-old Hazell began dating Natalie Sharp, a single mother with a 3-year-old daughter called Tia,
but the relationship was in no way conventional. After they split up, he began seeing
Natalie's mother, Christine Bicknell. -Well, I think Stuart Hazell is somebody who is quite predatory, who identifies people
that he can get things from, essentially, and he had a relationship with Tia's mother
that lasted all of about 2 1/2 weeks. And very soon after that, he started a relationship with Tia's grandmother,
which was much more longer lasting. -Although 10 years her junior, Hazell moved in to Christine's home on the Lindens estate
in New Addington, South London, in 2007. He soon settled in and enjoyed spending time
with Christine's now 7-year-old granddaughter, Tia, but he struggled to find work.
-Well, Stuart Hazell didn't really have a regular form of employment. He was in and out of prison so much,
and it's very difficult to maintain regular, well-paid, steady employment when you have a lengthy prison record,
so he would go from job to job doing work cash-in-hand and all of that type of thing.
♪♪ -By 2012, Hazell had found work as a window cleaner and was still living with Christine.
Over the past five years, he'd grown close to her granddaughter, but on Friday, the 3rd of August,
just 2 months after her 12th birthday, Tia Sharp went missing. -Tia went to her grandparents' house on the 2nd of August,
and that was a Thursday. She was supposed to have stayed there overnight, and then Friday morning, gone into Croydon.
She was due home Friday evening at about 7:00, but she never returned. But by Saturday evening,
it was clear she wasn't coming home. She hadn't made contact with her family or any of her friends.
Levels of worry and suspicion obviously became higher. -By the morning of Sunday, the 5th of August,
Tia had been missing for 48 hours. ♪♪ -I led a major investigation team. It was myself, two detective inspectors,
five detective sergeants, approximately 20 detective constables, and some civilian support staff.
I called my team in for an 8:00 meeting on the Sunday morning. We got together. We read all the hand-over files that had been done
during the course of the Friday and the Saturday and started to set some lines of inquiry.
-As the community rallied together in search of the missing schoolgirl, the media descended on New Addington,
clamoring to find out any information on the whereabouts of Tia Sharp. One of the reporters at the scene
was Sky News correspondent Martin Brunt. -It's that complete lack of evidence of Tia
after she supposedly left the house that's fueling police concerns. I had a call from Scotland Yard.
I was aware that a girl had gone missing. Girls go missing on a regular basis. Most of them turn up in one form or another,
and nothing more is said or done or reported, but I think there was a sense early on through police contacts
that this was rather more serious. They were very keen for us to give a lot of publicity
to the circumstances of Tia Sharp's disappearance. That suggested to me that they were already suspicious
that she may have come to some harm. -Investigative journalist and former police officer Mark Williams-Thomas
was also intrigued by Tia's disappearance. -I think what was very clear from the beginning,
both in terms of talking to family members, also being aware of her as an individual,
was that this isn't something that was likely to be herself running away, and it had now become a number of days
that she had been missing. So that concern about something having happened to her
I think was very, very real, and when I went and looked at the area, my focus was very much on those people
who had the last contact with her, and therefore, I wanted to try and speak to those people as quickly as possible.
-On Monday, the 6th of August, 2012, three days after her disappearance, Tia's family made an emotional appeal for her return.
-She's not in trouble. Come home. She's very much loved, very, very much missed.
Just contact any of us whatever way she can. -I want to say thank you to the police
for doing everything that they can and the public for being our support and being out there day and night.
I urge you not to stop. I want Tia found. -The police were desperate for any leads
about Tia's disappearance, and a new piece of information received by Nick Scola
made him focus on one member of the family in particular. -It was soon reported to me
that Tia had spent the evening at her grandparents' house. During the Sunday, it became clear that actually,
her grandmother wasn't present and Stuart Hazell wasn't her natural grandfather.
That made us very interested in the account he would give. -While the police continue to search
for the missing 12-year-old, they were growing ever more suspicious of the last person
to see Tia, a man whom she loved and trusted -- Stuart Hazell. ♪♪ In August 2012,
the police were searching for missing schoolgirl Tia Sharp. She'd traveled from her grandmother's home
in New Addington to Croydon on Friday, the 3rd of August, but seemingly vanished into thin air.
-We've got several hypotheses I start to work from. The first one is that she didn't go to Croydon,
that she was still on the estate somewhere playing with friends, staying with friends,
and deliberately not coming home as a missing person. There's a lot of open countryside around the estate.
As a second hypothesis, she's gone out there to play, and she has come to accidental injury
and is laying unconscious or otherwise disabled outside. Thirdly is that she's still in the estate,
and she's been abducted by somebody on the estate. -She doesn't appear on the CCTV cameras on any of the buses
or trams that would have carried her to Croydon. -The small community of New Addington
rallied around the Sharp family and began forming search teams to assist the police.
Thousands of posters and leaflets with Tia's photo were soon spread all across the area and beyond.
It became clear this was more than a family matter. It involved an entire community.
-Everybody is out looking for little Tia because we are a tight community. We will always come together.
Anything that goes on, we're there, you know? We are there for the family and for little Tia.
-She was a nice young, girl, and so, as a result of that, the concerns became heightened.
There was huge public response within the community, within this estate, and I think
as a result of that, it grabbed public's attention. -Joining the locals in this search
was the last person to see Tia before she disappeared -- her grandmother's partner, Stuart Hazell.
-He would walk out of the house and go off to do his daily business or to get involved in searches
or to make an appeal in front of the cameras. He seemed to be doing what you would expect him to do
in furthering the search for his missing step-granddaughter. I mean, I don't think his behavior in front of the cameras
was particularly alarming, but from early on, he was clearly a suspect for the police,
and we shared the same view. The last person to see Tia was always going to be somebody
that the police would have an interest in. -Stuart Hazell places himself right in the middle of this campaign.
You see him walking around wearing a T-shirt with "Find Tia" on it, almost as if to try and prove that,
"This is exactly what happened, and I'm not covering anything up." -It's not unusual
for an offender to get involved with the search. It's very usual because actually,
they then know what's going on. They've got a contact of what's taken place, and of course it pushes that concern away from them.
-What it did for me as a reporter covering the case was to give me lots of vision of him
because we did see him out and about on the estate joining in those searches, and there was a vigil one night,
and we had some very vivid images of him walking towards the setup on the estate
with a candle in his hand looking very concerned and joining in the search for Tia.
-The fact that Hazell wasn't a direct relative of Tia meant he was more of a concern for the police.
-I had a call from somebody involving the investigation saying, "Be very careful about your choice of words.
He's not Tia's grandfather. He's a step-grandfather. He is her grandmother's boyfriend."
Now, the very fact that somebody was telling me something like that, again, made me feel that Scotland Yard certainly saw him
as somebody that they needed to show a particular interest in. I think they were suspicious about him from the start.
Bear in mind that he said that Tia had left the house in the morning to go into Croydon shopping,
and yet the early searches of CCTV, eyewitnesses found nothing to corroborate what he said.
♪♪ -With no reported sign of Tia in the neighboring areas, police turn their attention towards the last place
they definitely knew Tia had been -- her grandmother, Christine Bicknell's, house,
number 20, the Lindens. Something about Hazell's story didn't add up. -He gave an account that they spent a very happy
Thursday evening together, got up Friday morning. He had made breakfast, and Tia decided she was going to go
and visit friends in Croydon, meet a friend in Croydon. The unusual part of that aspect is that
when we visited the house, we found that Tia's phone was still there, her mobile phone,
and in the back of your mind, then, you're wondering, "Well, how exactly are you going to arrange to meet a friend?"
Perhaps when we were younger, we'd arrange to meet at 3:00 at a certain place, but people today -- young people today --
they need the mobile phone to make the arrangement. -On Tuesday, the 7th of August, 5 days since her disappearance,
CCTV footage of Tia was released. They were the last-known images of her before she went missing.
The pictures showed Tia looking relaxed at a supermarket with Hazell. -When I was dealing with Tia's family,
they themselves had no suspicions that Stuart Hazell may be involved. No one took me to one side to say, perhaps,
"We're not happy about Stuart," or anything along those lines. In actual fact, quite the opposite -- they trusted him,
and I could see from the CCTV that Tia very much trusted him. She enjoyed going to her grandparents' house.
She had younger siblings at her address, and there wasn't a lot of space there. So she got some time and attention from her grandmother,
and her grandmother helped to make sure she got to school on time and just generally provided support for her.
-And new evidence discovered the following day, Wednesday, August the 8th, steered Nick
and his team away from Hazell even further. His next-door neighbor told police he'd seen Tia leave for Croydon
on the Friday morning she disappeared. -What certainly frustrated the investigation
was the evidence of the next-door neighbor. He knew Tia well, and he clearly stated
he saw Tia leave for Croydon at the time Stuart Hazell said. So he came up with this statement,
and it affects your whole investigative strategy because it directs attention away from the house back towards
was she abducted or taken on her way to Croydon or lost in Croydon or returning?
-By now, the police had searched Hazell's home twice and found nothing. With an eyewitness backing up his story,
it was looking increasingly likely that Stuart Hazell was going to get away with murder.
-This is somebody who had very little control over his life in his early years, his early days,
but now he would see it as he's the one who is running the show. He knows exactly what happens.
He's the only one who knew what happened in this situation, and I think the fact that he has all this knowledge
and these other people don't, he's really getting off on that. -He put himself right at the center of this.
He needed to know what was going on, because don't forget, he knew exactly what had happened,
and he wanted to keep as much as possible away from the home address. He must have been, I mean, jumping up in air, thinking,
"They've searched the house, and they haven't found Tia's body. I've got away with it."
-The police searched Hazell's house for a third time on Wednesday, the 8th of August,
but this time with specially trained dogs. -I then asked a body-recovery dog to search the premises
because the searches hadn't been destructive. The bath panel hadn't been removed.
Floorboards hadn't been lifted. It's hopeful, then, the body-recovery dog would give an indication if there was a dead body there,
still a missing-person inquiry, but just in case. The body-recovery dog didn't give an absolute indication,
but a handler afterwards told me that it behaved unusually in one of the rooms, so, armed with that information and the fact the investigation,
we're going and we're checking the facts on the investigation, decided to have a more forensic look at the house,
but through this search, the family had to move out. -By Wednesday evening, there'd been more than 50 reported sightings of Tia Sharp,
and the police were still hoping she may be found alive. As investigators prepared
for a more forensic search of Hazell's home, he thrust himself into the spotlight once more.
A TV interview was about to make a supposedly concerned relative look like a guilt-ridden killer.
-Tia, come on back. Come on. Come and eat dinner. I want me 10-pound back from me garden.
We love you, babe. Come back. -Come back to normal. -Please. -Enough of this. It's going to be back to normal.
Just come home and be back in the family. She's part of the family. Come on. Nothing has changed.
No one is in trouble. Come on. ♪♪ -On Thursday, the 9th of August, 2012, Tia Sharp, a 12-year-old schoolgirl,
had been missing for almost a week. The police were certain that the last person to see Tia,
her grandmother's partner, Stuart Hazell, knew more about what had happened to her
than he was letting on. The media felt the same way and began to question Hazell's role in Tia's disappearance
as the news story continued to shock the country. ♪♪ -Well, people were horrified.
They always are when girls go missing, and I think people who were watching TV saw the blanket coverage that we were giving to the case,
and I think they perhaps picked up on the fact that the police were more concerned
about her disappearance than they might be with the disappearances of other girls.
I think throughout that week, there was a growing sense that this was a girl who probably wasn't going to be found alive.
It was a story that I think more and more people, as the days went by, believed that this was a story
that would end in the discovery of her body. -So whilst it was clear the media were portraying Stuart Hazell as a suspect,
you must go where the evidence takes you, and there was no evidence that Stuart Hazell was involved
in Tia's disappearance at that stage. -Hazell agreed to a televised interview with
Mark Williams-Thomas from ITV News to tell his side of the story. -This is going to go onto the ITV News.
-So this will go on the 6:00. 6:30. -6:30 news, yeah. -Okay. That's good enough.
-I said, "Right, whatever happens, we run throughout, so even if we break, we keep the recording going
so the mic is on constantly," and I said, "Just go with it. Whatever happens, go with it," so we got in.
We set up, and Stuart was really anxious. He was very anxious, and what I needed from him
was a really detailed account in real micro-detail about what happened from the point
that Tia came to the home to the point that she was last seen by him, so minute by minute,
as much as he could breaking that down, and that's what I did, and I got him to talk in real detail
because I knew that every single piece of that interview would be pored over by the police
because by the Thursday morning after the phone call that I had saying Stuart would give an interview,
I knew this was an interview with a killer, no doubt about it at all. -Well, if they believe what they read in the papers,
they can do whatever they like because I know deep down in my heart that Tia walked out of my house.
She walked out there. I know damn well because she was seen walking down the pathway.
-Body-language expert Robert Phipps was certain Hazell was lying. -I loved her to bits. She's like me own daughter.
-Stuart's behavior throughout this interview in inconsistent with somebody who is in turmoil, worried,
you know, anxious about Tia Sharp being missing. His body language is far too animated.
He's shrugging his shoulders a lot. People shrug their shoulders when they're saying,
"I don't know," but he's giving supposedly truthful statements and saying, "I don't know."
-I know she made that trek down to that light. -And I think he was struggling at times,
sometimes, to be able to remember what he necessarily said to everybody else, and, of course, the more detail I asked of him,
the more difficult it became for him to remember exactly what he'd said because what he couldn't do, of course,
was give me something that he'd given to somebody else differently. -"Did you do anything to Tia?" Well, no, I bloody didn't.
-Stuart adds in a lot of detail, which is superfluous to his actual answer. -From the co-op, we just gone to tea
because you come out the co-op and take a right, cut down. There's a little pathway and the bus stop, the T31 bus.
-This is to pad out the story because it's not the truth, so he's adding in other bits that make it sound truthful.
Now, when you talk to most people to recall a story, they don't tell it in a logical, orderly sequence.
They start saying something, and then they remember something else, and the conversation actually,
or the statements that they're making, chop and change. -Crossed over and bought groceries
and come home. -During normal conversation, people blink around about 20 blinks per minute.
-If you look at Stuart's behavior, his blinking rate is around about 40 to 45 blinks.
This is very high and would indicate that he's actually nervous about what's going on
during the interview. -He seemed to me somebody who was insincere. His breaking down, his almost-tearful performance
smacked to me of somebody who was trying to put on a performance. The fact that he was sitting there with the T-shirt,
"Find Tia," I think there was a picture of her in the background, all suggested to me that this was a man
trying too hard to appeal for information when he knew exactly what had happened to her.
-She walked past me from the front room to go out, and she walked out the front door.
That is all I know. -What he's doing is he's looking away from the interviewer and down and to his right.
This normally indicates that he's using the left-hand side of his brain. This is where you go to construct pictures.
If it's a memory that you have in your head, you would generally look up and to the left,
which means you're using the right-hand side of your brain, which is generally where most people hold their visual memory.
-It's bad. It's bad. No one knows. We're getting false hope. We're getting people seeing sightings.
Yeah, it's good to get the sightings, but we want 100% definite sighting, so, I mean, it's just crazy.
-One interested viewer was the detective leading the case, Nick Scola. -So whilst Hazell was a person of interest at that time,
there was no evidence to suggest that he had actually been involved in Tia's abduction,
so, for that reason, you're clearly interested in what he's got to say. We were surprised when the TV interview came out
because the family never told us it was going to take place. We had been with the family that morning,
and then suddenly, that evening, his interview is appearing on TV. -Interviews like this with Stuart are crucial to the police
in helping them gain a further understanding to what they already know because the person is sort of off-guard
because it's not the police interviewing them anymore. -Stuart Hazell is a narcissistic predator.
He sniffs out other people's vulnerabilities. He inserts himself into families where he will be looked after
and he will be pandered to and he will have the things that he wants, and I think what we can see when we look at him
performing in his interviews with television and with newspapers, he is the center of attention,
and he absolutely loves that because he's fully in control of everything that's going on around him.
-Hopefully, time will -- The next 12 hours will bring some good news. -Yeah. We haven't got any of that lately.
-[ Chuckles ] Yeah. I'll be honest. -The following day, Friday, the 10th of August,
the police were due to return to Hazell's home to carry out a forensic search of the property.
On the same day, Tia's grandmother, Christine Bicknell, noticed a bad smell coming from the house.
-So she calls the police. The police turn up, and it was a family liaison officer
walks into the house and goes, "Yeah. You're right. Everyone out." -It would be the fourth and final time
the police search the house. -When we went back on that Friday morning, immediately, officers went into the house.
They could smell a very strong smell that from their experience, they recognized
to be that of a decomposing body. -The forensic teams follow the smell up into the attic,
where the police made an horrific discovery. ♪♪ -Pushed into the eaves was Tia's body,
completely wrapped in black bin liners and taped in very tightly. -You know, very sad moment
because, you know, you always live in hope. Although the reality is probably less than a percent,
you always live in hope that she will return until they found the body. -The search was over.
Tia had never left the house to travel to Croydon. She'd been murdered in her grandmother's home.
Her body had been hidden away for a week. The entire nation was stunned. -The sense of loss here is mixed with all sorts of emotions.
People feel cheated. Their week-long campaign was a desperate mission to find Tia Sharp.
It ended with the 12-year-old found dead in her own grandmother's home. -I was gobsmacked.
We had watched detectives, forensic teams, police dogs go in and out of the house several times,
but even I, at that time, didn't think for a moment that they were about to say they'd found Tia's body in the house
where I'd been standing outside for the best part of a week and the police had searched three times already.
-I just got off the tube, and my phone went mad with loads and loads of text messages, voicemails.
Anyway, I read one text message, which was from a colleague of mine at the BBC, a correspondent.
He said, "You know they found the body?" and I said, "Where?" and he said, "In the house."
I said, "You're joking," and he went, "No, in the loft." I mean, that's terrible, and I said,
"Well, where is Stuart? What's happened to him?" and they said, "Oh, he's on the run. He's gone."
-"Where is Stuart Hazell?" was the question running through a lot of people's minds.
That morning, he'd left the house and had yet to return. -Hazell had told Tia's grandmother, Christine,
that he was going to get a paper, and he disappeared and never came back. So we immediately mounted a London-wide search for him.
He was seen on a train going up towards Central London, and, again, we know he got off that train
in the city of London, and we searched for him there. He then disappeared off the radar for a short while
before reappearing in a supermarket. -The CCTV captured a distressed Hazell buying some vodka.
-He was drunk. He was rambling. He was talking to people about, "You still need to help me find my missing granddaughter."
It was obvious to those in the shop who he was, and they were aware the police were looking for him.
-The owners of that supermarket recognized his face from the press appeal and contacted police.
Hazell, by that stage, had gone into an area of open parkland where he'd bought vodka in the supermarket,
and he drank the vodka. Police searched for him, and a police dog found him in the undergrowth.
-This all unraveled on a Friday early evening, and by late evening, we were told that he'd been arrested.
-Hazell had lied to police about Tia leaving the house for Croydon a week earlier.
He was the last person to see her alive and the number-one suspect in her murder.
♪♪ The week-long search for missing 12-year-old schoolgirl Tia Sharp had come to a tragic end.
Police had found her body in the loft of her grandmother's house. On Saturday, the 11th of August, 2012,
Stuart Hazell, Tia's grandmother's partner, was being questioned on suspicion of her murder.
-So what can you tell me about the murder of Tia Sharp, Stuart? -I'm kind of [Speaks indistinctly]
-Okay. -On the same day, a postmortem was being carried out at Croydon Mortuary.
-Clearly, Tia had been dead for a week, and unfortunately, the body had begun to decompose quite badly.
-The thing with decomposition is that the rate can be very variable. It depends on all sorts of factors.
If you've got somebody who is wrapped up to prevent the smell getting out, they're potentially in somewhere that's not particularly warm,
which will retard decomposition. In this particular case, the passage of time and the changes that had occurred to the body
in the postmortem period really limited what pathology could tell you. -The police still had no evidence
that Hazell had killed Tia, but a further search of the loft had uncovered her clothes, glasses,
and, hidden elsewhere in the house, something truly sinister. -On this occasion, found pushed behind the doorframe
on the inside of a cupboard door above head height was a memory card for a digital camera.
We recovered deleted images from that card that were quite disturbing. There were some where clearly, he had searched the Internet
and found pictures of girls that were not dissimilar-looking to Tia in that they had glasses and a similar hairstyle,
but worst of all on that memory card was perhaps the most grotesque image I've ever seen.
♪♪ So we took the photograph to show a pathologist, and he pointed out the hypostasis on it,
which is essentially how the blood pools on a dead body, and this pathologist was of the opinion that
that was a picture of a dead girl. -Also recorded on the memory card were a number of videos.
-One was of Tia sitting on a settee. It looked like she was rubbing suntan lotion,
some kind of cream into her legs. Clearly, he had given the impression perhaps he was sending a text or something,
but all the time, he was secretly filming Tia. -One of the clips undeniably linked the camera to Hazell.
-Another video which was particularly unnerving, it showed Hazell filming Tia when she was asleep.
He had obviously gone into her room and was walking around her with the phone in his hand.
He also just briefly filmed his own shadow on the wall menacingly standing over her.
-On Saturday, August the 11th, 2012, Stuart Hazell was charged with the murder of Tia Sharp.
He was remanded in custody at Belmarsh Prison, where he wrote a letter to his father
claiming Tia's death had been an accident and that he was contemplating suicide.
He wrote, "I can't sleep, can't eat. I wish I could turn back the clock, but I can't.
I'm sorry to have lied to you all, but I didn't know what to do. Forgive me." ♪♪
Nine months after the murder of Tia Sharp, on the 7th of May 2013, 37-year-old Stuart Hazell
pleaded not guilty as his trial began at the Old Bailey. -Hazell pleaded not guilty at court.
His defense case statement indicated he was going to say that Tia had accidentally fallen down the stairs.
He had panicked, didn't know how to tell her mother and grandmother that the granddaughter was dead,
so panicked and hid the body. And that's the stance he maintained throughout the prosecution case.
-The training of forensic pathologists is not only to identify injuries but to recognize patterns of injuries,
and to suggest that someone had died of falling down the stairs, there are very specific things that we would expect to see.
And if we don't see those, you can fairly quickly exclude such an explanation. -Investigative journalist Mark Williams-Thomas
was in the courtroom. -So the interview I did with Stuart Hazell opened the trial up for the prosecution's case.
The trial sat through, and information started to come out. And it was very clear that Stuart Hazell had become...
very sexually interested in young Tia. -And one of the searches he had carried out on his mobile phone
on the Internet was incest sex, and that just highlighted and reinforced that interest.
-For Tia's mom, seeing Stuart Hazell in the dock would have been the first time she had seen him
since the day of his arrest, and I can remember trying to watch the interaction between the two.
It's a classic thing that crime reporters look for to add color to the reporting of the first day of a trial,
and she looked at him, stared daggers at him, if you like, and as far as I can remember, he spent those first few moments
and most of the trial looking down, not wanting at all, for very obvious reasons,
to catch the eye particularly of Tia's mother, but for any members of Tia's family,
quite a few of who were there. -On the third day of the trial, the indecent photograph of Tia's body
was shown as evidence against Hazell. The entire courtroom, including the Sharp family,
were horrified. -They were so upset. They were unbelievably upset because, you know,
they've heard the detail, but there's one thing hearing it and another thing seeing it.
And at times, they actually had to leave. -And it appeared it was all too much for Hazell, as well.
On May the 13th, he changed his plea to guilty, stating, "Tia's family have suffered enough."
It was a huge shock. -I think you can only imagine the reaction of people in court.
There were gasps. There were shrieks. There were tears from some of those in the public gallery.
It really was one of those courtroom moments of real drama. I've seen a few, but this is still very vivid in my mind.
-Hazell definitely didn't change his plea to save the family any more agony or despair.
He changed his plea because he's a coward because that morning, he would have to account
for the disgusting photograph of Tia's death, and he just didn't have the moral strength to do that.
-On May the 14th 2013, Mr. Justice Nicol sentenced Stuart Hazell to life imprisonment
with a minimum term of 38 years. He was immediately sent to Belmarsh Prison. -I mean, I don't know, sad and sad,
it's just really sad, the whole thing. When you add it all up, you get to the situation.
Now, here was a young girl who loved her gran. She loved her mom, but loved her gran,
loved spending time with her gran, you know? She saw solitude in her gran, as many, many young children do,
and to go to a place where, of course, that eventually was where her death occurred was so sad.
And of course, nobody could have predicted that other than Stuart Hazell. -Christine Bicknell said it never crossed her mind
that Stuart Hazell would hurt Tia. She knew nothing about his alleged involvement
in her murder. If she had, she said, he would be dead, too. -In his sentencing remarks, Mr. Justice Nicol stated that
Hazell had developed a sexual interest in Tia but that the murder wasn't necessarily sexually motivated.
Now, that does seem to be a bit of a confusing thing to say on the surface, but essentially, what the judge means there is that
Stuart Hazell is somebody who has a sexual interest in young girls, but in terms of did he kill her
in order to have sex with her, possibly not. We can't know that for sure, but the overarching theme here is power
because that's what sex is about. It's about power over another individual, especially when it comes to Stuart Hazell.
-Hazell has never spoken about how or why he killed Tia Sharp. -All I can tell you from Stuart Hazell
is that he took away a life, a precious life of a young girl who had an amazing future in front of her,
and as a result of that, he has impacted on many, many other people's lives and he deserves to spend the rest of his life in jail.
-I don't think we'll ever know what made Stuart Hazell kill Tia Sharp. That's information that I don't think he's ever
going to share with anybody, but we can surmise a little bit as to the context of it.
He's trusted to look after this girl, and he abuses it. And we don't know what the circumstances are around that,
whether he felt that she would perhaps tell somebody about something that he had done to her or to somebody else,
but he found himself in a situation where he had to control her. He felt that she had slipped out of his control,
and she posed some kind of a threat to him. -If that is in torment, if he lives in anguish every day, if he regrets or he thinks about
what he's done every single day, then so be it. -In August 2013, Hazell's next-door neighbor,
who had given police a false witness statement, was sentenced to five months in prison.
Hazell had asked him to lie about seeing Tia leave for Croydon, and in June of the same year, the house where Tia was murdered
was bulldozed to the ground in an attempt to erase the memory of the sickening murder.
-I think Stuart Hazell did some incredibly evil things, but he chose to do those evil things.
He could have chosen not to, and he was fully aware of the impact of his actions.
-He's a horrible man. He's a dangerous man. You know, Stuart Hazell is the reason that she's dead,
nobody else, Stuart Hazell, and if Stuart Hazell hadn't done it to her, in time,
he'd have probably done it to somebody else. -We may never know what drove Hazell to kill the 12-year-old girl
who called him granddad, but we can be sure his unhealthy interest in Tia Sharp led to the innocent girl being murdered.
He caused the Sharp family unimaginable torture, knowing all along what he'd done to Tia.
His empathy towards them came too little too late, proving that Stuart Hazell is one of the world's most evil killers.
♪♪

Stuart Hazell had sexually assaulted and murdered Tia, his partner's twelve-year-old daughter.

An in-depth look at the lives and crimes of some of the world's most evil killers, including Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez, Cary Stayner, Leonard Lake, Dorothea Puente and more.

Brief Summary

Tia Sharp, 12, was murdered by her step-grandfather Stuart Hazell, shocking the nation during a public search for her.

Key points

The Killer Revealed. Stuart Hazell, Tia's grandmother's partner, was identified as her murderer.
The Disappearance of Tia Sharp. 12-year-old Tia Sharp vanished from her grandmother's home, sparking a massive search.
The Emotional Appeal. Tia's family made a heartfelt plea for her return as the search continued.
Community Response. The local community rallied together to search for Tia, showing immense support.
Hazell's Suspicious Behavior. Stuart Hazell's actions during the search raised suspicions among police and the public.
The Discovery of Tia's Body. Tia's body was found hidden in her grandmother's home, shocking the nation.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

He knows exactly what happened.

0:56WatchJul 8, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

More from True Crime Files

Solve the Crime

Read a real case one clue at a time, then see how your call held up against the investigators.